Why do modern Bible translations leave out verses?

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If you've spent much time comparing Bible translations, you've noticed that some verses, or portions of verses, have been moved from the main text into a footnote.

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The footnotes usually say that the verse does not appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. Why are these verses questioned by scholars?

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Are they attempting to achieve some dark objective which results in casting doubt upon the inspiration of the

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Bible? The quick answer is that nothing sinister is going on. Rather than removing verses, scholars have valid reasons to believe that some verses should have never been in the

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Bible to begin with. Many people have the mistaken impression that in the original languages, the

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Bible is a single document. In reality, scholars have thousands of manuscripts that were all copied at different times and in different places.

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The ancient scribes were fanatical about accurately replicating the documents, but they made mistakes sometimes.

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Textual criticism is a discipline that seeks to identify copying mistakes in an effort to determine what the original

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Bible documents said. The process involves comparing thousands of manuscripts with each other and drawing conclusions about the variant readings.

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The end result of this work is a document used as a textual base for translating into other languages.

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The King James translators relied upon a Greek text which was compiled by a man named

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Erasmus. Erasmus's textual base eventually became known as the Textus Receptus.

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By the late 1800s, more manuscripts had been discovered that were older and more reliable than any

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Erasmus had access to. They were used to compile a revised textual base that came to be known as the

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Critical Text. Consider these variant readings from Acts chapter 20 verse 7 from the

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Textus Receptus and the Critical Text. In this instance, the Critical Text uses the word

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WE and the Textus Receptus uses THE DISCIPLES. Which reading was more likely the one the author of the

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Book of Acts wrote in his original document? In this particular example, modern scholarship leans in favor of the word

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WE. Textual criticism tries to determine which reading is more probable when such a discrepancy arises.

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With this in mind, perhaps we should consider the question the other way around. Instead of asking, are verses missing?

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Perhaps we should be asking, were verses added? It is important to keep in mind that even though there are textual variations in the

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Bible manuscripts, they are of minor significance. None of the discrepancies affect the

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Bible's crucial teachings. Even if the so -called missing verses were completely removed, the